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<div style="font-size:90%; float:right;">
=Laptop News 2007-06-30=
__TOC__
1. Washington: Walter Bender had to dust off his tuxedo in order to receive the Bridging Nations “Bridge Builder Award: Technological Innovation for Bridging Digital Divide” on behalf of OLPC.
</div>


To contribute a story or news idea, see the '''[[OLPC:Newsroom|OLPC newsroom]]'''.
2. Porto Alegre: Juliano Bittencourt reports that UFRGS (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul) held a small conference, INOVA, to share the best research from the university with the local community. As they did at the International Free Software Conference (FISL), researchers from the university brought a group of children to conference to share their experiences with the use of the XO. The children stole the spotlight: “it was very satisfying to see how they talked with people, how they became autonomous, and were very proud of their projects. They behave like small scientists, making interviews with their laptop using the camera, taking notes in the Write Activity, and posting reports to their blogs on AMADIS.”


For coverage of recent OLPC updates, see our [[twitter]] feed and [http://blog.laptop.org OLPC blog].
3. Green: Mary Lou Jepsen has completed all paper work for environmental compliance with EPEAT, the organization that implements the IEEE 1680-2006 computer environmental standard. OLPC’s EPEAT “Gold” status is now pending. Mary Lou has a draft version available of our ISO14001-compliant OLPC environmental policy, which is required for EPEAT compliance. In addition, OLPC has joined and filed for Energy Star 4.0 recognition; the XO exceeds the Energy Star compliance requirements by 14-fold.


This page historically hosted announcements and news about OLPC, along with the Sugar Labs [http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Current_Events '''current events'''] page.
4. Safety: OLPC, Quanta, and UL met this week to discuss progress on safety testing. Preliminary findings are excellent; further details of testing were discussed, including specific in-country requirements. The XO appears to be on track for UL certification; further testing of batteries and AC adaptors is planned. UL will help us apply for CE markings to allow us to ship in Europe.


== Upcoming pieces ==
5. Trial-2: Tuesday marked the feature-freeze date for the Trial-2 software release. We have begun testing of the software release (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Test_issues); there are test plans for activities, connectivity, performance, mesh view, suspend/resume, and updates. Thanks to Zack Cerza, John Fuhrer, Cameron Meadors, and Ronak Chockshi, who have contributed to these plans.
; Claudia
: Learning Chat piece: 278 words, ready now. [[File:Learning Chat.docx]]
: Making Learning Visible: Claudia's (& Walter) original is 25 pages. Submitted to a journal. w/o OLPC Background it is down to 12-15 pages w/ screenshots.
: This can become a 4-part series.
; Antonio: Homo docens: 500+ words, Antonio approved my edits. [[File:Homo docens JLedits.docx]]
: Further work: we can definitely ask him to contribute on a quarterly basis but I've found that I have to be very specific as to what I am asking to do and he has to be comfortable that it is consistent with his academic work.
: Ask for a new piece on the epidemiology of learning
; Rodrigo:
: [[Ometepe]] - A beautiful piece with wonderful images. RAH posted a personal and lengthy version (1500+ words) that he shared with his private distribution list. I made an edited version (1200 words) that could be shared publicly. Must check with RAH on this. [[File:Ometepe articulo por Rodrigo Arboleda.pdf]] [[File:Ometepe by Rodrigo Arboleda (3).pdf]]
: I had hoped that we could do a video series with Rodrigo but the budget hasn't been approved. Giulia - can we get an answer on this?
; Rwanda:
: Rwanda case studies
: Ceri Whatley - summary of importance of headmasters - confirm subset to reuse
: Social mapping project - 1- or 2-part piece - check w/ Julia
: Grandmother project - 2- or 3-part piece - check w/ Julia (and is there more to that awesome series?)
; Other Africa
: So. Africa case studies
; Peru and Uruguay:
: ''Oscar B's piece on the IADB study?''
: You said that Uruguay and Peru produce a ton of content on a continuous basis. I'm struggling a bit with how we can easily get the content and translate it into English. Giulia - could Olga help? I don't want to burden her with more work. Maybe we do this every 2-3 months.
; Other LatAm:
: Colombia: Sandra's quarterly? newsletter and website could feed into this. Plus english translations.
: Nicaragua: Regular update, beyond Ometepe?
: Paraguay: Contact [[ParaguayEduca]]
: Mexico: Ask Mariana @ OLPCMexico
; OLPC Australia: Great text and videos.
; OLPC Europe: Quarterly update from them?
; OLPC Oceania: Quarterly updates from Mike Hutak
; OLPC Jamaica: Quarterly update from Sameer, good videos.
; North America
: Miami - David! and a story from Chester
: Canada - Jennifer Martino, Q


== News archives ==
6. Network: The Collabora team continued work on the peer-to-peer networking pieces that will allow Sugar Activity authors to readily share data between their activities; the focus has been on “tubes” and multicast support for the mesh. Dan Williams helped debug direct XO-to-XO communications and plowed through more network manager (NM) issues. Dan, along with Kim Quirk, John Watlington, Scott Ananian, and Michail Bletsas continue to refine NM as we realize more functionality and stability in our network drivers and get more feedback from internal testing and the field.


'''[http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/community-news/ Weekly OLPC News postings]''' to the community-news mailing list give updates on recent work. Weekly summaries were also posted on-wiki during [[OLPC:News/2008|2008]]. Weekly postings to the list were put on hold at the start of 2009, and started again in 2010.
Michail tested the latest wireless firmware from Marvell (5.110.16.p0). It solves the issues with lazy-WDS access points (like the extremely popular Linksys WRT54G). This is the issue where XOs associated with a WiFi access point will stop passing traffic intermittently for which we had a temporary (ugly) workaround in place. The current firmware, besides having the latest suspend/resume code bits, uses a new mesh frame format that is closer to the latest proposals circulating in the 802.11s standard committee. Unfortunately, the new format is incompatible with the older format; we will incorporate the new firmware in the XO builds and server software ASAP to minimize confusion.


Archives: [[OLPC:News/Archive 1|2005-2006]]
7. User interface: Marco Gritti hooked up Sugar and the core Activities into the Fedora translations system and has already integrated a community-contributed Arabic translation.
| [[OLPC:News/Archive 2|2007]]
| [[OLPC:News/Archive 3|2008]]
| [[OLPC:News/Archive 4|2009-10]]


=== Translations ===
Marco and Benjamin Berg continue to refine the GTK (GIMP Toolkit) themes in conjunction with the design work being done by Eben Eliason and the Pentagram team. They also revisited the Journal core feature set that will be part of the first release software. Tomeu Vizoso continued his work on the web browser. He implemented an “object-chooser dialog” that is used in place of the standard file picker for the browser; items can now be uploaded from the Journal to the web. Tomeu also add the ability to shut down the XO from the home view (the power button will be used for suspend). In the Journal, he also implemented the latest toolbar design, added the ability to erase items, copy items onto the clipboard, and support for removable storage devices (e.g., USB sticks).
Sporadic translations of news archives from 2008 and earlier can be found here:
: [[OLPC:News/lang-de|German]] | [[OLPC:News/lang-es|Spanish]] | [[OLPC:News/lang-ja|Japanese]] | [[OLPC:News/lang-ko|Korean]]


== [[OLPC:Videos|OLPC videos]] ==
Dan, Marco, and John Palmieri also did packaging work in support of the Fedore Core 7 update. Dan also worked on some unresolved X video (Xv) bugs.
For a history of videos about OLPC and the XO, see [http://olpc.tv olpc.tv] and [[OLPC:Videos]].


== Sugar news ==
8. Power management: Richard Hughes worked on the XO’s power management interfaces. He reports that our hardware abstraction layer detects and exports proper power supply interfaces, which means Activities have an easy way of querying the battery and the AC adapter. His patches should land soon. Richard also worked on D-Bus system activation; important in order to start system services through a standardized interface. He has a policy manager (OHM) running on the laptop that will do things such as dim the backlight when the machine is idle and turn off the panel when the lid on the XO is shut.
Walter continues to post summaries of Sugar development '''[http://walterbender.org/?cat=3 on his blog]'''.


== Press ==
9. Software updates: Scott Ananian, Ivan Krstić, Chris Blizzard, David Woodhouse, and Alex Larsson engaged in a (somewhat heated) discussion of the XO upgrade model; a concrete specification will be the outcome.
For an archive of OLPC media coverage, see the [[OLPC:Press/2005-2008|2005-2008 press archives]].


== Past announcements ==
Meanwhile Alex spent the week working on the “Updatinator” code. His utilities that can generate manifests, generating differences between manifests, verify a directory tree against a manifest, and upgrade a directory tree from one manifest to another. He also has a tool that can generate a manifest from a set of images. His code, written in Python, knows how to download blobs and manifests from a http server, using a well-defined format and uses Avahi to automatically find local machines that have newer versions of a manifest. He also put together a small web server that an XO can run in order to export an image such that other laptops can upgrade from it.
Developed through 2011 by the Racepoint Group, OLPC's ''pro bono'' PR firm.


* 2008-08-06 : [[Media:OLPC-Asia.doc|One Laptop per Child expands its presence in Asia]] with project leads in India and China
Chris Ball has written a script that performs a backup of user data during upgrades; we can start using it next week. Scott benchmarked XO upgrades between Builds 464, 465, and 466 using rsync, “improved” rsync, and “improved” bittorrent. (He wrote code to use per-directory manifests to improve rsync and added the ability to bittorrent filesystem images, complete with user/group/mode and special file information.) He also started implementing a skeleton XO upgrade system that we can use to automate our 100+ laptop mesh-network tests in the coming weeks.
* 2008-05-20 : [[Media:XO-2-preview.doc|One Laptop per Child frames the next generation of the revolutionary XO laptop]], with a lighter dual-touchscreen design.
* 2008-05-15 : [[Media:XP-on-XO.doc|Microsoft Windows XP is now available on the XO laptop]]
* 2008-05-03 : [[Media:Kane-appointment.doc|One Laptop per Child appoints Charles Kane as President and Chief Operating Officer]]
* 2008-01-07 : [[Media:G1G1-results.doc|One Laptop per Child Giving Campaign Raises $35 Million]] in 2007
* 2007-12-12 : [http://www.smartbrief.com/news/aaaa/industryPR-detail.jsp?id=2FDAB6BE-AE3B-482F-A7B0-6570C75397E4 ''The Kite Runner'' Inspires Gift Through One Laptop]
* 2007-12-05 : [[Media:Peru-OLPC.doc|Peru launches OLPC with 40,000 laptops]], starting with one-classroom schools across the country.
* 2007-12-04 : [[Media:Birmingham-OLPC.doc|Birmingham, Alabama commits to One Laptop per Child]], with a pilot of 15,000 laptops across the city.
* 2007-11-24 : [http://www.50x15.com/en-us/sol_results_xo.aspx The Holiday Season Starts with Giving One Laptop]
* 2007-10-29 : [[Media:Uruguay-launch.doc|OLPC wins a bid to provide 100,000 laptops to children in Uruguay]], to be overseen by the Uruguayan CEIBAL project
* 2007-10-22 : [http://www.businesswire.com/news/google/20071022005302/en One Laptop per Child creates the world's "greenest" laptop computer]
* 2007-06-11 : [[Media:Mass-production.doc|Mass Production of XO's begins!]] at Quanta's Chinese facilities.
* 2007-01-03 : [http://www.businesswire.com/news/google/20070103005194/en OLPC Announces First-of-Its-Kind User Interface for XO Laptop Computer]


10. Microphone: Chris Ball reports that the audio driver now keeps the microphone-in-use LED off while the audio hardware is not being used. There is still a bug remaining: the LED turns on during both recording and playback (because the default state of the driver is to have the V_Ref microphon bias turned on).


11. Fun and games: Lincoln Quirk has been working on infrastructure stuff and the pygame wrapper. He has been experimenting with various techniques for integration of GTK and pygame; he also did some preliminary work with Eric Nelson to use the camera as a game input device. It still in process, but the wrapper supports the game keys properly. Lincoln also done a lot of documentation work in the OLPC wiki.


[[Category:OLPC]]
Roberto Faga has been working on an adventure game toolkit; he has been tackling the challenging problem of creating a simple generic parser that can cope with different noun/verb/object word orders in different languages. At the same time, he's trying to construct a user interface (UI) that would allow the creation of these games in a purely graphical model.

Patrick DeJarnette's side-scrolling game engine got a lot faster this week, and now has semi-intelligent moving “enemies.” It should be a lot of fun for the children to design their own game levels.

12. Analog input: Arjun Sarwal has created a basic UI for turning the XO into an oscilloscope. He has built controls for AC/DC, bias, RMS AVG, and Pk-Pk values. He is working with John Watlington to characterize the frequency characteristics of the AD1888 and they are working towards enabling the double sample rate that this chip supports. They are also studying the filter in the power supply, with the goal to reduce the noise floor. Another target is to bring down to 0V the minimum voltage that the analog input port can sample (the current minimum is 0.4V).

=More News=
Laptop News [http://laptop.media.mit.edu/laptopnews.nsf is archived] at [http://laptop.media.mit.edu/laptopnews.nsf/latest/news Laptop News].
Also on [http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/community-news/ community-news].

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the [http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/community-news laptop.org mailman site].

Press requests: please send email to press@racepointgroup.com

=[[Milestones]]=
Latest milestones:
{{:Milestones}} <!-- Translators, you can either include the english version or the translated version -- it does NOT work with redirects -->
All milestones can be found [[Milestones|here]].



=[[Press]]=
{{:Press}}
More articles can be found [[Press|here]].

=[[Video of the OLPC | Video]]=
Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found [[Video of the OLPC|here]].

* A collection of several videos can found at [http://www.olpc.tv OLPC.TV]
* IBM Podcast, Walter Bender on One Laptop per Child [http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/podcast/dwi/cm-int042407.html]
* Ivan Krstić delivers a [http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4285568518538296189 technical presentation of OLPC] at the Google TechTalk series
*60 Minutes, What if Every Child had a Laptop [http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/05/20/60minutes/main2830058.shtml]
*CNN, Should Intel Fear $100 Laptop? [http://money.cnn.com/services/video/]
*Red Hat Magazine: Inside One Laptop per Child, [http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/06/08/inside-one-laptop-per-child-episode-03/ Episode Three]
*Red Hat Magazine: Inside One Laptop per Child, [http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/04/25/inside-one-laptop-per-child-episode-02/ Episode Two]
*Red Hat Magazine: Inside One Laptop per Child, [http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/03/23/inside-one-laptop-per-child-episode-one/ Episode One]
* OLPC [http://www.sf.tv/var/videoplayer.php?videourl=http%3A%2F%2Freal.xobix.ch%2Framgen%2Fsfdrs%2F10vor10%2F2007%2F10vor10_26012007.rm%3Fstart%3D0%3A05%3A20.498%26amp%3Bend%3D0%3A09%3A50.738 Video from Switzerland], 26.01.2007
*Interview with Nicholas Negroponte [http://www.acm.org/pubs/cie/jan2006/clips/nicholas_negroponte.mov on the &100 Laptop]
*Presentation by Jim Gettys at [http://www.techpresentations.com/2007/03/07/one-laptop-per-child/ FOSDEM 2007]
*GLOBO- BRASIL: Crianças testam computador portátil/ [http://video.globo.com/Videos/Player/Noticias/0,,GIM607884-7823-CRIANCAS+TESTAM+COMPUTADOR+PORTATIL,00.html Students test the laptop]
*Mark Foster delivers presentation to [http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/courses/ee380/061004-ee380-300.asx Stanford University]
* Technology Review [http://www.technologyreview.com/video/laptop Mini-Documentary]
* A Brief [http://www.radiofarda.com/Article/2007/01/04/f2_Interview-laptop.html Demo]

Latest revision as of 23:06, 5 August 2013

The contents of this page are considered outdated and some of the information may be stale. Please use information here with caution, or update it.
  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.

To contribute a story or news idea, see the OLPC newsroom.

For coverage of recent OLPC updates, see our twitter feed and OLPC blog.

This page historically hosted announcements and news about OLPC, along with the Sugar Labs current events page.

Upcoming pieces

Claudia
Learning Chat piece: 278 words, ready now. File:Learning Chat.docx
Making Learning Visible: Claudia's (& Walter) original is 25 pages. Submitted to a journal. w/o OLPC Background it is down to 12-15 pages w/ screenshots.
This can become a 4-part series.
Antonio
Homo docens: 500+ words, Antonio approved my edits. File:Homo docens JLedits.docx
Further work: we can definitely ask him to contribute on a quarterly basis but I've found that I have to be very specific as to what I am asking to do and he has to be comfortable that it is consistent with his academic work.
Ask for a new piece on the epidemiology of learning
Rodrigo
Ometepe - A beautiful piece with wonderful images. RAH posted a personal and lengthy version (1500+ words) that he shared with his private distribution list. I made an edited version (1200 words) that could be shared publicly. Must check with RAH on this. File:Ometepe articulo por Rodrigo Arboleda.pdf File:Ometepe by Rodrigo Arboleda (3).pdf
I had hoped that we could do a video series with Rodrigo but the budget hasn't been approved. Giulia - can we get an answer on this?
Rwanda
Rwanda case studies
Ceri Whatley - summary of importance of headmasters - confirm subset to reuse
Social mapping project - 1- or 2-part piece - check w/ Julia
Grandmother project - 2- or 3-part piece - check w/ Julia (and is there more to that awesome series?)
Other Africa
So. Africa case studies
Peru and Uruguay
Oscar B's piece on the IADB study?
You said that Uruguay and Peru produce a ton of content on a continuous basis. I'm struggling a bit with how we can easily get the content and translate it into English. Giulia - could Olga help? I don't want to burden her with more work. Maybe we do this every 2-3 months.
Other LatAm
Colombia: Sandra's quarterly? newsletter and website could feed into this. Plus english translations.
Nicaragua: Regular update, beyond Ometepe?
Paraguay: Contact ParaguayEduca
Mexico: Ask Mariana @ OLPCMexico
OLPC Australia
Great text and videos.
OLPC Europe
Quarterly update from them?
OLPC Oceania
Quarterly updates from Mike Hutak
OLPC Jamaica
Quarterly update from Sameer, good videos.
North America
Miami - David! and a story from Chester
Canada - Jennifer Martino, Q

News archives

Weekly OLPC News postings to the community-news mailing list give updates on recent work. Weekly summaries were also posted on-wiki during 2008. Weekly postings to the list were put on hold at the start of 2009, and started again in 2010.

Archives: 2005-2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009-10

Translations

Sporadic translations of news archives from 2008 and earlier can be found here:

German | Spanish | Japanese | Korean

OLPC videos

For a history of videos about OLPC and the XO, see olpc.tv and OLPC:Videos.

Sugar news

Walter continues to post summaries of Sugar development on his blog.

Press

For an archive of OLPC media coverage, see the 2005-2008 press archives.

Past announcements

Developed through 2011 by the Racepoint Group, OLPC's pro bono PR firm.

Retrieved from "http://wiki.laptop.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=OLPC:News&oldid=290742"